Weekly Summary (Week 4)

This week was all about video. How to make video, how to watch video, anything you could imagine. So I started this week by learning all about video. First I looked at Roger Ebert’s “How to read a movie”. This was a very interesting article on how to look at movies and really break down why the scene is shot that way and why the director chose to do that. You can check that out here.

Next I looked at popular movie scenes to continue applying these ideas to film. I chose to look at one of my favorite movies of all time, The Pursuit of Happyness. This was so fun to do because I love this movie to begin with, but adding this level of analysis really deepened a lot of the scene for me. You can check out that breakdown here.

Next was 2 assignments that were very fun to do. The first I did while I was down in the Outer Banks this past week. I decided to make a time lapse of a view over the sound. This was a very fun assignment to do for the simple fact that it makes an amazing outcome. Check out that here.

The second assignment I did was to make an instant replay of a video clip. For this assignment I chose to take one of my favorite teams, the Yankees, and one of the best players in the league right now, Aaron Judge, and make a slow motion video of one of his swings. This was pretty tough because he swings pretty damn fast! Check it out here.

Looking at peoples blogs this week gave me a different reaction than last week. Last week I saw more things about the process of making things on other people’s blogs, but this week was different. This week gave me an appreciation for peoples’ lives. Sure, I learned some things about how to cut and rearrange video, but watching peoples 60 second days or where my feet take me gave me a peek into other peoples’ lives and I thought that was awesome. Another invaluable thing I learned this week was how to read a movie. This was something I really had not thought about before, but after reading about it, it was really crazy how much of it is used in movies. You could really see many styles that directors have and use on a regular basis. It gives you something to look at when watching films and really helps you to analyze them. Overall, these assignments were rather difficult because I really hadn’t used any video editing software before and getting used to it was kind of difficult. The feedback I got back was also very valuable. Some people brought up many things that I had not thought of to do in the original assignment. Something I will need to change in the future! Overall this was a good week. The challenges of the software was outweighed by the reward of watching my own and everyone else’s amazing videos. Onward towards the last week!